Random Universe

The universe this book describes may be random, but it is also both gorgeous and familiar. The poet is in love with the details of the world and brings them to the reader like a bouquet delivered right to your door. There is also wisdom and warmth in these poems, a willingness to engage with life and also to see it from a philosopher's perch. So many adjectives apply to this book: gorgeous, wise, erudite, funny, fun, surprising, heartfelt. There are many pages to savor again and again. After you read Random Universe, you will feel as if you've had a delicious meal with an even more delicious conversation. --Zack Rogow, author of Irreverent Litanies

Carolyn Miller's new poetry collection is a remarkably inclusive work, with a playfulness in form and structure that feels wonderfully inventive. In these pages, she takes on ekphrastic responses to Cy Twombly's art, "mistranslations" of Milosz and Tranströmer, and her own translation of an ancient Egyptian text. She creates list-poems of "Lost Language" and "New Lines for Fortune Cookies" and writes about the lives of objects. And through it all, she shows her remarkable talent for writing about sensuous joy, joy that is earned, though haunted by history and the poet's place in it. I am glad to sit at the banquet table of her Random Universe and feast. --Julia B. Levine, author of Lullaby for the Sixth Extinction

In Carolyn Miller's Random Universe, the astonishing range of subjects--a reckless polka, a cemetery in Spoleto, the discovery of salvation in the paintings of Cy Twombly--may seem random, but it is a world held together by this poet's fierce and tender gaze. Miller's voice, in her fourth collection, is both companionable and wise, funny and stunningly able to find form and beauty in an incomprehensible world. She gives us the music, again and again, for experiences variously wondrous, cruel, and breathtakingly strange in their "jazzy beauty and sheer effrontery" right before our eyes. These are poems of a compassionate observer with remarkable vision, poems that, paradoxically, can awake both calm and wildness in our hearts.